How's your Battery Life?

[lguy]

I'm not able to get a full indicator. phone is two days old

 

[fldude99]

Anybody here purchase a spare battery & charger?

 

[lilleediver]

Was curious as to what kind of battery life everyone is getting...mine was dead halfway through my day today.

Mine too, also the overheating while charging caused me to send back the first two and this one will go back soon. I think they all came out of the same shipment. Att has agreed to take it back. I can't even get the charge finished before I get the overheating symbol and have to shut it down.
Where did you get your's from? Mine all came from Letstalk.com but after 30 days att will take over problems and replacements. if you do call them, ask for the android dept immediately.
lilleediver

 

[lilleediver]

Mine too, also the overheating while charging caused me to send back the first two and this one will go back soon. I think they all came out of the same shipment. Att has agreed to take it back. I can't even get the charge finished before I get the overheating symbol and have to shut it down.
Where did you get your's from? Mine all came from Letstalk.com but after 30 days att will take over problems and replacements. if you do call them, ask for the android dept immediately.
lilleediver

 

[lilleediver]

Got a great deal on eBay 2 batteries and chargers, cases stylus and etc for about $30.00. They are Samsung batteries, but Samsung says using after market devices may void the warranty

 

[lilleediver]

Hm, I'm not really sure whats with all the battery issues people have been reporting. Every day I've had this phone ('cept maybe the first day?) I've only had to charge it once each night. I fully charged it the first day before ever using it. I've been messing with the GPS, syncing contacts, downloading apps, watching videos... pretty much everything you could do, practically everyday, all day. I've let it run down all the way till the phone turns off each day.

What I find pretty surprising, is that once it tells you that the batter is low and to plug it in, it will quite a bit longer than expected (like 2 hrs on less than 10%? could be wrong, haven't timed it).

I also have gtalk running and email pushing. Twitter syncing 30min. Facebook sync 1 hr. Don't know how often google syncs. I don't make a lot of phone calls so, I don't know how that will affect stuff.

I've been playing MP3s nonstop since 9:00am (now 1:00pm) and the battery is at 61%. Watched some video (short/youtube review type stuff).


As far as the comments regarding the percentage of battery the display is using? Well, duh! That's what the largest part should be. If it was a piece of software, then yeah, I'd be concerned.

This is my 3rd Captivate and I got all of them from letstalk.com. Where did get your phone? Do you know what batch it is from? I don't know how to tell? ATT will replace this phone ater I come back from vacation. I just hope it works as good as yours
I have three batteries use all them up every. My phone gets so hot, I can't hold it my hand when I am charging it. I am only using one app alot. It's called audible.com for listening to books, so my screen is usually off.

 

[xtracrispy69]

I'm new to android so i expect some big battery drain. What is mediaserver? I've read it has to do with mp3s and videos which I run neither but it consumes the second most in my list. The only thing I can think of is homerun 3d game. Any way to find out?

 

[s2h2golf]

For those of you asking about battery life, I typically get more than a day out of my battery with light to moderate use. I am running a custom ROM (Cognition), but even before that I was normally sitting at 73% after 17 hours with light use. The screen was on for 1hr 46min, and I talked more than an hour on the phone. The secret is to calibrate the battery so the phone knows the absolute 0 and absolute 100 capability of the battery. Recalibrating Your Battery... - xda-developers

View attachment 4330

 

[s2h2golf]

OK, see my post above? This was typical for me, until I let the battery discharge all the way down to where it shut off. I have always recharged my battery before it hit 10%. Now, regardless of what I do, my battery drain is twice as fast as it was. I haven't installed any new apps or changed ROMS - I even uninstalled old apps and changed my screen settings to see if that would correct the problem. I re-calibrated the battery monitor 4 times with the same result. I read online on a couple of websites that completely draining a LiIon battery damages it and shortens the life of the battery. There are differing opinions on that though.

So here's my question - for those of you with battery issues, have you let your battery completely discharge in the past?

Edit: from XDA forums:

Li ion batteries don't let you discharge them completely. The are regulated to cut out before ask voltage is lost. The only way to damage a battery like that is to drain the battery and then let it sit around for a few months.

So I guess it wasn't completely discharging the battery that killed my battery life. I'll have to figure something else out.

 

[vailjo91#WP]

Alright as someone who works for ATT and uses a captivate I personally dont have issues with mine ever. Here are some common things that I see people doing that kills there battery.
Downloading a lot of applications every day. - This makes you use your wifi or 3g both of which will burn battery time quickly.
Streaming Music constantly
Watching Youtube every minute they are bored.
Leaving WIFI on all the time. - This is a personal thing that I see people do a lot and then I have them come into my store and start complaining about the battery life. Leaving wifi on in a area in which you have no connection is one of the biggest things to kill a battery.
Task Killers- Take this as you may. If you are not running Adroid 2.2 I always suggest running a task killer to take out the applications that are running in the background and are essentially taking away from battery life.
Having your phone on vibrate constantly or ring and viberate - The one thing that will kill batteries fast is getting a bunch of calls or texts with vibrate I always tell people to have it on plain ring as much as possiable.
Having Audiable Touch Tones and Viberate touch tones- Turn them off. 2 reasons I say this 1. they are flat out annoying to most people and 2. they will kill your life a lot of the time.
Just some of my thoughts and things I have seen while I am ay work and things I noticed on mine. Hope it helps some of you out.

 

[Nophix]

I've actually noticed that I have worse battery life after flashing Cognition. Now, it isn't terrible by any means whatsoever! I use the thing literally all day. If I'm not streaming audio or video, I'm on the web or making calls. I have a 10 hour work day and 2 hours of commute, and usually an hour or so before leaving in the morning. Before Cog, I'd have about 1/4 left, with Cog I have 18%.

This may be related to better battery reporting in Cog, or the fact that I could have more running than before.

Either way, if it gets too low, I just plug it in. Why is everyone so afraid to do this?

 

[s2h2golf]

I think I fixed my battery issue. Right now sitting at 57% after 27 hours of use. What finally worked was pulling the battery before re-calibrating the battery monitor. I'll post a screen shot when I hit 10%.

 

[s2h2golf]

Got tired of waiting for the battery to hit 10%, so I went ahead and got this screen shot at 18%. I used some Wi-Fi to peruse my home network and print off 4 photos, used Grocery IQ for about 30 minutes, talked for 41 minutes, checked email 7 times, surfed the web for about 30 minutes. I did eventually uninstall ShootMe (and re-installed to take the screen shot), changed Beautiful Widgets to update every 4 hours (with screen refresh) and took the battery out before I re-calibrated it. I will admit, once it was at 50% with 27 hours on the battery, I took it easy to see if I could hit 2 days.

View attachment 4448

 

[Thanontos]

How do you guys have low display amounts. Mine is at 88% usage. I have 1% left on my battery. I turned downed all settings for the screen and set the timeout at 15 seconds

 

[darkhelmet]

post removed

 

[steve2526]

I've actually noticed that I have worse battery life after flashing Cognition. Now, it isn't terrible by any means whatsoever! I use the thing literally all day. If I'm not streaming audio or video, I'm on the web or making calls. I have a 10 hour work day and 2 hours of commute, and usually an hour or so before leaving in the morning. Before Cog, I'd have about 1/4 left, with Cog I have 18%.

This may be related to better battery reporting in Cog, or the fact that I could have more running than before.

Either way, if it gets too low, I just plug it in. Why is everyone so afraid to do this?

My battery life after flashing Perception Build 7 on Monday has been awful. Currently at 82% about 3 hours after unplugging with a full charge.

It just dropped another point as I typed that!

All I've done is send/receive 4 IM's, about 20 minutes on the internet (not using WiFi) and 10-15 minutes in the market.

I have no problem plugging the phone in -- I do it every time I'm in my car, but if I'm away from a power source for any length of time I'm worried this thing will drain in no time.

 

[meyerweb#CB]

Task Killers- Take this as you may. If you are not running Adroid 2.2 I always suggest running a task killer to take out the applications that are running in the background and are essentially taking away from battery life.

This just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how Android manages applications. Load a program like System Panel, and learn to understand what it's reporting, and you'll see that applications in the background use no CPU until they're called on to do something. If they use no CPU, they use no memory. Forcing Android to continually reload applications into memory when it needs them uses more battery than just leaving them sit there.

 

[bigbot45]

Hi All,
I've found the source of my battery issues and it is Swype! It seems the Swype process never sleeps when you're not using the keyboard. My phone had been using 5-7% an hour. Then I switched keyboards and used OS Monitor to kill the Swype background process and my battery usage has dropped to 1-2% an hour.

-BB45

 

[carbon]

I think most people are not taking into account the effect of low signal levels have on any wireless device. The phone adjusts its transmit power based on how strong the RSSI (Receive Signal Strength Indicator) level is... the little bars of signal... If you are sitting in a place with low signal level, the phone will boost its transmit power to compensate for being, apparently, further from the cell tower. This will obviously increase current draw on the battery.

This goes hand in hand with the comment above about leaving the WiFi radio on when you are out in your car as it searches high and low for an accessible network.

If you have a good WiFi connection where you are, switch to that for data, and only use 3G when you are out and about, not only will this save a tremendous on your 2 gig cap, it lowers the power usage of the radios in the phone.

 

[Chris Kerrigan]

WiFi is tremendously better on battery life than 3G is, so definitely take advantage of WiFi whenever you can. To add to what Carbon said about signal strength, also bear in mind that if you’re in an area of incredibly sketchy or no coverage at all, turn off your network connectivity or put the phone into Airplane mode. When you have no signal, the phone constantly is searching for network coverage, and this absolutely KILLS your battery.